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Two of Europe’s largest companies, Airbus and Safran, are joining forces to fight SpaceX’s attempts to steal away their majority share of the lucrative commercial space launch business. This is one of the first times that one of the larger, entrenched, government-backed aerospace consortia has deigned to raise a quizzical eyebrow in acknowledgement at the presence of SpaceX — but it certainly won’t be the last. SpaceX, after a series of cheap, successful space launches, is now starting to make waves: After decades of expensive, monopolistic control of space travel, companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Airbus are finally going to have to slash their costs to stay competitive. This is how the era of cheap space travel begins.

Arianespace, co-owned by Airbus and the French government, has dominated the commercial space launch business for years, and is by far the world’s largest player when it comes to putting satellites into orbit. Following the Falcon 9’s high-profile missions to the International Space Station, its much lower cost ($60 million vs. $120 million for the Ariane 5, pictured above), and SpaceX’s continued advances towards reusable space launchers, it was only a matter of time until Arianespace was forced to react. Today, Airbus has announced a partnership with Safran (a French rocket engine maker) to create a new family of price-competitive space launch vehicles.

The Safran-made Vulcain rocket engine, as used on the Ariane 5 launcher

When it comes to big-time commercial space launches, there are three main players: The United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing), Arianespace (Airbus and French government), and International Launch Services (Lockheed, and two big Russian companies, Khrunichev and Energia). These consortia account for close to 100% of the annual multi-billion-dollar spend on space launches. SpaceX is one of a few new upstarts that wants a piece of that pie. [Read: SpaceX unveils Dragon V2, the world’s first commercial manned reusable spaceship.]

As we’ve seen, though, when it comes to big government contracts it can be hard to squeeze out an incumbent like Lockheed or Boeing, both of which have decades-long relationships with the government (and no doubt a significant amount of cronieism). SpaceX is currently fighting the US government after it awarded a huge defense contract to the United Space Alliance without a fair bidding process. The ULA argues that it alone has the strength and breadth to successfully manage the US military’s space efforts. SpaceX probably wouldn’t argue that the ULA has more experience, and is a more tried-and-tested entity, but everyone has to start somewhere.

Ultimately, with SpaceX offering a space launch service that costs less than half of what Ariane or ULA can offer, it’s only a matter of time until Elon Musk’s company picks up some juicy contracts. These big, entrenched companies know that of course — but until they start working on their own cheaper, reusable systems, there isn’t much they can do — except, of course, to use the large amount of political capital that they’ve banked over the last few decades to prevent the upstarts from getting a foothold.

Curiously, despite Airbus and Safran announcing a partnership to develop a new line of launch vehicles, there’s no explicit mention that these launchers will be reusable. It’s also worth noting that Airbus/Arianespace is already fairly far down the path towards developing its next-gen Ariane 6 launcher, which will be smaller than Ariane 5 (and thus cheaper), but still eschewing any reusable elements. SpaceX has a sizable lead in the field of cheap, reusable space launch vehicles, and in the next few years we will hopefully see it drive that advantage home.

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